What the hell is a 'soul' anyway?

[Lucanus]

So information cannot be associated with a particular state of matter and energy?

If you were not so hopelessly ignorant you would know that some things can be distinct without being alienable. For example, a purely material explaination of a book says absolutely nothing about its content and people can discuss the content of a book without making any reference to its material. Moreover the contents of the book are not bound to a particular material, the content could take the material form of an audio recording or a film or a memorization. The material of the book can support a wide variety of content from David Foster Wallace to a Chinese phone book.

But see, the content of the audio recording or the book is *completely* material. I fail to see why the information should be independent of its support, not to mention someone who is actually capable of interpreting it. A Chinese phonebook is completely unintelligible (therefore, void of any sort of information) to somebody who does not read Chinese. If nobody in the world was capable of reading Chinese, that phonebook would be completely meaningless and hold no information whatsoever anymore, because nobody would be able to understand it. That's the reason why I think that information exists only in our minds as a way to interpret and understand the world around us.

Also, don't you think that people "discussing the content of a book" have made some sort of decodification, recodification, copy-and-paste of the content from that book to their own neural networks?

And how would you go about testing this assertion? If it can't be verified then, as Kitan said, it's woo-ey word salad.

It’s call information theory. But I can understand how people like you and Kitan, being stuck in 19th century science think of it as woo. I find it continually amusing how supposedly ‘logical and scientific’ atheists cling to their irrational dogma even as modern natural science has started to come full circle, albeit with using different nomenclature. Information is just a reincarnation and extension of Aquinas’s moderate realism. The notion of ‘emergent properties’ (the atheists undefined mind-brain theory) is a watered down version of essentialism. Atheist dogmatic thinking prevents them from noticing that the nominalism/conceptualism they embrace is incompatible with emergent properties.

That was an hilarious amount of hand-waving and ad hom. Next time someone says you're spewing word salad, please try to explain it. Oh, and citations please.

ETA: What about computers, CDs, VHS tapes? They store information, so do they have a soul?

’Estimated Time of Arrival’? When it comes to inanimate things, we usually substitute the words ‘function’ for Final End and content for Formal Cause.

The fact that you call ideas beyond the comprehention of your narrow dogmatic worldview 'word salad' only shows the ignorance and stupidity of the person making the accusation.

If you were not so hopelessly a pompous douchebag, you would know that ETA means "Edited to add". But that's beside the point...

Again, you just can't see that the one holding a "narrow dogmatic worldview" is you. What is a "final end"? What is a "formal cause"? Are they accurate descriptions of how reality works, backed by experiment and evidence, or are they just a human construct we have to make sense of what we commonly experience?